Research
Research
Most people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity, despite rural electrification being a policy priority. We provide evidence that high transaction costs, particularly transportation expenses to access mobile money agents for bill payments, are a key friction for rural households. In rural Togo, these costs account for 28% of solar electricity-related expenditures, rising to 43% in more remote areas. To assess the impact of transaction costs on policy outcomes, we analyze the staggered rollout of two nationwide policies in Togo in 2019: a solar home system subsidy and an expansion of mobile money agents. The subsidy, which nearly halves electricity prices, more than doubles adoption rates. However, the effects vary significantly: households with lower transaction costs—those with direct access to mobile money agents—adopt at much higher rates and decrease the number of payments they make in response to the price reduction. The mobile money agent expansion led to nearly a threefold increase in adoption, an effect similar to that of the subsidy. By reducing transaction costs, these policies enable bulk purchases and lessen the need for frequent payments. Our findings highlight the complementary roles of subsidies and financial inclusion in improving rural electrification and access to essential services.
Secondary school completion remains low in low-income countries despite major gains in primary education. We experimentally test whether exposure to a role model and access to shareable educational technology can improve high-stakes graduation exam performance in rural Togo. Two weeks before national exams, 320 students were randomly assigned to watch either an inspirational role-model film (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind) or a placebo film; a random subset of role-model students additionally received a portable solar study lamp, enabling us to measure spillovers through pre-existing social networks.
Intent-to-treat estimates show modest average gains. However, accounting for lamp spillovers reveals much larger effects: placebo-film students who did not receive a lamp but had a lamp recipient in their network were 13.1 pp more likely to pass. All role-model students — regardless of lamp access — experienced significantly higher pass rates of 11.4–16.4 pp. Midline survey evidence suggests the role-model film increased self-beliefs and reallocated time from external work toward exam preparation via higher revision-class attendance and daytime study. Among spillover students, it also sparked active expansion of nighttime study networks to access lamps.
Both interventions appear to operate through distinct motivational and network-amplification mechanisms, though we cannot reject equal effects — plausibly due to ceiling effects given the two-week implementation window.